By Alexandra Alper
WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) – The Trump administration’s “troubling” decision to pause key tech security measures aimed at Beijing jeopardizes U.S. national security in the interest of steadying relations with China, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Monday.
In a letter sent to Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick and seen by Reuters, the lawmakers raise questions about the shelving of a ban on China Telecom’s U.S. operations as well as proposed bans on U.S. sales of routers by TP-Link and the U.S. internet businesses of China Unicom and China Mobile. The moves were reported by Reuters on Feb. 12.
“The Administration’s actions suggest a troubling pattern of sacrificing America’s national and economic security to stabilize relations with China and resolve the trade war the President himself started,” write Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sydney Kamlager-Dove, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs panel’s South and Central Asia Subcommittee.
Meeks and Kamlager-Dove asked Lutnick to brief the committee on any assessments his agency made of the national security and technology security consequences of the decisions and whether it is true that the office charged with scrutinizing foreign tech threats was told to focus on countries other than China, as Reuters reported.
The Commerce Department and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The letter is part of a growing chorus of concerns raised by Democratic lawmakers that the Trump administration is reining in any U.S. government action that could antagonize Beijing following a trade truce reached by Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump in October.
In addition, Trump is slated to travel to China from March 31 to April 2 for a highly anticipated meeting between Xi and the U.S. president, who lead the world’s two biggest economies.
Also paused were measures that would have barred sales of Chinese electric trucks and buses in the U.S. and a prohibition on Chinese equipment sales for U.S. data centers, Reuters reported.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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